ANNOUNCEMENTS

We celebrate the close of summer with our fall ingathering service that features a water communion. You are invited to bring a small amount of water from a place or experience that holds a special place in your life, or simply speaks to your gratitude for the water that flows from your tap each morning. During the ceremony, your water will join that of others, in our congregation’s bowl.

The Reverend Carol McKinley is an affiliated community minister with the Olympia UU Congregation, and serves on the Pacific Northwest District Board and the district’s Healthy Congregation’s Team.

Services are held at Burley Community Hall at 4pm on the 2nd and 4th Sundays. Please bring finger foods to share.

Rev. Dr. Kurt Schwalbe will be leading a musical tribute to Woody Guthrie at 4pm at Burley Community Hall.Woody Guthrie was a singer and songwriter who embodied the drive toward social justice which is so precious to Unitarian Universalists. He knew suffering and failure; he also experienced success and happiness. As a patriot he often sang out a harsh criticism of his country.

John Steinbeck wrote that Woody expressed "...the will of a people to endure and fight against oppression. I think we call this the American spirit."

Let's enter his world by remembering his life and singing his songs.As always, bring finger foods/snacks to share.

Rev. Dr. Kurt Schwalbe, Minister Emeritus of the San Juan (Island) Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, will be both singer and story teller about the life and songs of Woody Guthrie.Kurt grew up near New York City, participating in the Urban Folk Revival of the 1960s. After serving First Parish of Brewster, MA, as the summer minister in 1971, he travelled with his wife, Elizabeth to Nepal to undertake doctoral field research in Tibetan Buddhism. He and Elizabeth lived for four years in Nepal, spending most of that time in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery. After earning his PhD in 1979, he taught Tibetan language and World Religions in several colleges and institutes during the 1980s. He travels each year to India to teach courses in Buddhist philosophy and Tibetan language. He looks forward to singing about values that Unitarian Universalists share with Woody Guthrie.